A hunter’s eye for nature

For pure delight you must away to Northampton and see this admirable celebration of the centenary of Denys Watkins-Pitchford (1905–90) — amazingly, the first ever solo show of his pictures. Watkins-Pitchford was born and lived in Northamptonshire; he went abroad only a couple of times but he travelled extensively in Britain. Watkins-Pitchford and BB were one and the same. As an artist he used his own name; as a writer the pseudonym — derived from a heavy shot designed for shooting wild geese.

Through illustration, BB combined his artistic and literary talents. He illustrated 60 books of his own and countless others, including classic fairytales, as well as literally thousands of articles and such incidentals as bookplates, Christmas cards and a set of postage stamps (to be reissued this July to mark his birthday) — much of it, alas, destroyed as ephemera.

BB’s glory years were the 1940s and 1950s. He had later successes, not least in the 1960s with some charming travelogues (The White Road Westwards, etc.) and especially with the adventures of another BB, the belligerent Bill Badger, a badger bargee. BB’s equal love of the countryside and the chase was the very essence of old rural England, but it is a measure of his international acceptance that Bill Badger was particularly popular in Japan.

However, it is to the earlier years that we owe such classics as The Little Grey Men, 1942, his most famous book, an epic journey by ‘the last gnomes in Britain’, which won the premier children’s book award, the Carnegie Medal, and is still on option to Hollywood; Brendon Chase, 1944, England’s ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and his own favourite, about three teenage schoolboys who run away and live by their wits in a forest — their example causing havoc in post-war boys’ boarding schools; Wild Lone, 1938, which did for foxes what Henry Williamson did for otters; and his first book, The Sportsman’s Bedside Book, 1937, taken to war by many a serviceman as a treasured reminder of home.